THE NéW YORKER ONLINE < www.newyorker.com THIS WEEK'S WEB EXCLUSIVE: ELIZABETH KOLBERT TALKS ABOUT HILLARY ON THE Hill PLUS: Jonathan Franzen Alma Guillermoprieto Philip Gourevitch Deborah Garrison Adam Gopnik Stanley Kunitz Katherine Boo Kevin Conley Jon Lee Anderson Jerome Groopman Jane Mayer Jonathan lethem John Cassidy Joan Acocella Jeffrey T oobin Peter Hessler Judith Thurman Peter J. Boyer Rebecca Mead Ken Auletta Larissa MacFarquhar Seymour M. Hersh Lawrence Wright Edna O'Brien Maira Kalman and more AND: A calendar of New Yorker events across the country 92 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 13, 2003 did not know how long she sat there. The water cooled. When she lifted her- se awkwardly, through the surface film, the pumice chinked against her flesh. It was an odd little sound, like a knock on metal. She put the pumice back on the rack, and touched her puckered wound with nervy fingers. Supposing something had been left in there? A clamp, a forceps, a needle? Not exactly looking, she explored her reconstructed navel with a fingertip. She felt a certain glossy hardness where the healing was gOIng on. The next thing she noticed was a spangling of what seemed like glinting red dust, or ground glass, in the folds of her dressing gown and her discarded underwear. It was a dull red, like dried blood. At the same time, she noticed that the threads of her underwear ap- peared to be catching, here and there, on the healing scars. As the phenome- non grew more pronounced, she touched the area tentatively, over the cotton of her knickers. Her fingers felt whorls and ridges, even sharp edges. Each day the bumps and sharpness, far from re- ceding, grew bulkier. One evening, in the unlit twilight, she finally found the nerve to undress and tuck in her chin to stare down at herself What she saw was a raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a nebula. It was the color-or a color-of raw flesh, like an open whip wound or a knife slash. It trembled, because she was trembling, but it was cold to the touch, as cold and hard as glass or stone. From the star-arms, red dust wafted like glamour. She cov- ered herself hastily, as though what was not seen might disappear. The next day, it felt bigger. The day after, she looked again, in the ha1f-light, and saw that the mark was spreading. It had pushed out ruddy veins into the tired white flesh, threading sponge with crystal. It winked. It was many reds, from ochre to scarlet, from garnet to cinnabar. She was ha1f tempted to insert a fingernail under the veins and chip them off She thought of it as "the blemish." It extended itself-not evenly, but in fits and starts, around her waist, like a shingly girdle pushing long fibrous fin- gers down toward her groin, thrusting out cysts and gritty coruscations above her pubic hair. There were puckered weals where flesh met what appeared to be stone. What was stone-what else was it? One day, she found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. These she tried to prize away, and failed. They were attached deep within; she felt their stony roots stirring under the skin surface, pulling at her muscles. Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh, making her clothes crackle and rustle. Slowly, slowly, day by quick day, her torso was wrapped in a stony encrustation, like a corselet. She could feel that under the stones her compressed inwards were still fluid and soft, responsive to pain and pressure. She was surprised at the fatalism with which she had resigned herself to her transformation. It was as though her thoughts and feelings, too, had slowed to . stone-speed, nerveless and stolid. There were, increasingly, days when curiosity jostled her horror. One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels, and she thought of jewels before she thought of pustules. Her legs now chinked together when she moved. The first apparition of the stony crust outside her clothing was strange and beautiful. She observed its beginnings in the mirror one morn- ing, while brushing her hair: a neck- lace of veiled swellings above her collar- bone, which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids, and be- came opal-fire opal, black opal, gey- serite, and hydrophane, full of watery light. She found herself preening in the mirror. She dismissed, with no real hesita- tion, the idea of consulting the surgeon, or any other doctor. It was, of course, theoretically possible that she was de- luded, that the winking gemstones and heaped flakes of her new crust were feverish sparks of her anesthetized brain and grieving spirit. But she didn't think so-she refuted herse as Dr. Johnson had refuted Bishop Berkele by tapping on stone and hearing the scrape and chink of stone responding. No, what was happening was, it appeared, a unique transformation She assumed that it would end with the petrifaction of her vital functions. A time would come when she wouldn't be able to see, or move, or